In much of the country, teaching is still a solo activity, but some states are beginning to explore policies that could encourage better collaboration and creative staffing.
That’s the conclusion of a nationwide policy analysis released today by the National Council on Teacher Quality, a policy and research group. It found that “strategic staffing"—models that incorporate more team teaching or feature different instructional roles for educators—have started gaining traction across the country.
Twenty-three states now allow districts to apply for waivers to pilot strategic staffing models, and eight offer additional pay for teachers who take on leadership roles in these systems.
Some of the most common strategic staffing models include:
- Teams of four to five teachers collectively teaching groups of 50 to 150 students.
- Having highly effective teachers co-teaching and mentoring other teachers—often for additional pay.
- Student or resident teachers taking on more classroom responsibilities while working under a supervising teacher.
But many states’ policies, NCTQ found, make it more difficult for districts to establish career progressions for teachers that keep them in the classroom while still taking on leadership roles.
For example, 11 states require teachers to be individually evaluated without taking into account team duties, and 13 states bar teachers from formally observing their colleagues, even when it’s unrelated to evaluations.
“It’s really important to reimagine the teaching role by tapping into the expertise and the possibility that multiple roles at multiple stages of the teaching career could provide,” said NCTQ President Heather Peske. “The focus is on really trying to use all the available resources and all the available personnel to support students, to strengthen student outcomes, and also to improve the efficacy of teachers themselves.”
Teachers are much more likely to leave their profession than lawyers or engineers, or even other “helping” professions like nurses or police officers. While there is still limited evidence on the most effective models for collaborative teaching, the flexible staffing approaches can provide more stability for students, said Brent Maddin, the executive director of the Next Education Workforce Initiative at Arizona State University, which is working with more than 150 school districts nationwide to develop and implement new staffing models.
“Churn is a serious problem we need to solve, but I don’t know that we need to solve it for every single educator being on the job for 30 years—because I think those days are probably gone,” Maddin said. “We need to build a workforce that confronts the brutal reality that, yeah, we are going to have some number of people that are constantly moving through the workforce. And right now, the one-teacher, one-classroom model doesn’t do that.”
NEWI partner schools have developed everything from an elementary school where teachers lead multi-age groups to a junior high school where teacher teams are led by content-area specialists.
Teachers in the staffing pilots are able to develop more specialized responsibilities within the team, such as managing classroom technology or communicating with parents. “Those are two very different skill sets. Right now we ask every educator to be equally great at all of the things; in no other profession do we really do this,” Maddin said.
Teacher schedules and duties by necessity involve their contracts, and Maddin said that teachers’ unions have been generally receptive to developing staffing structures, as long as teachers were part of their development and the models improved working conditions.
“When educators are presented with the opportunity to lean into their strengths and things that they’re passionate about, they leap at that opportunity,” he said."It doesn’t necessarily mean that there’s less work, but it often does mean that they’re doing fewer things more deeply.”
Peske agreed. “There’s an important distinction,” she said, “between add-on responsibilities for teachers—mentoring is often one of those—and schools where teachers are actually taking on roles and responsibilities that are cohesively embedded in the school day, working in collaboration as part of a team with other teachers.”
For example, the Ector County independent district in Texas, working with Public Impact, a Carrboro, N.C.-based nonprofit education reform group, created teams of teachers, paraprofessionals, and teacher residents led by a “multi-classroom leader.”
On a typical day, this lead educator—chosen based on a record of high student growth—might teach students in the morning and then provide intensive support and professional development to other team educators in the afternoon.
